


Until golden-brown

by azul_ora



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF!T'Pring, Baking, Cooking, Eating Disorder, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 14:06:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8059228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azul_ora/pseuds/azul_ora
Summary: Five members of the Enterprise that never cooked, and one that always did.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **PLEASE READ**  
>  Mentions of eating disorders, starvation, child abuse and bullying - some referenced, some explicit. If any of this triggers or squicks you, please consider before reading.

_**Wuhkuh** _

Jim hates cooking.

Cooking reminds him of Tarsus IV and that's a minefield waiting to happen if he ever saw one.

Cooking reminds him of scavenging for bugs and creatures and bringing them back to eight starving kids. Cooking reminds him of hunting  _kreshvet_ , an indigenous animal of Tarsus IV that looked like scaled rabbits. Cooking reminds him of the stench of vomit in his nose and the taste of bile in his throat after he ate some mushrooms. He hadn't seen the fungus on the bottom. Cooking reminds him of chewing bark and leaves, eating dirt and grass on the nights when their stomachs cramped with emptiness, when they barely had enough to drink, let alone to eat. Cooking reminds him of drooling at the smell of seared human flesh as the colony burned.

(Cooking reminds him of the first time, in the warehouse.)

Cooking reminds him of the weeks and months afterwards, when he binged and purged for hours, eating till he cramped and puking till his teeth were yellow with stomach acid. Cooking reminds him of being 40 kilograms overweight and still so  _hungry_ , desperate, bingeing like he's starving. Cooking reminds him of puking like he's dying, trying to flush everything out of his body, trying to make it all  _go away_ , trying to make it  _stop_.

Jim hates cooking.

* * *

_**Dahkuh** _

Nyota doesn't cook.

Back at home on Terra, it was always her father who cooked.

(He was a chef, it wasn't his fault, it wasn't fair of Nyota to blame him for it.)

But Nyota did.

Nyota blamed him for the days of cold salad while he was off serving spiced (albeit replicated) meats and  _real_ wine to offworld ambassadors. Nyota blamed him for the three weeks they couldn't go into their family kitchen because the stink of burnt Deltan  _schren_ made them all puke. Nyota blamed him for the fire that left half their house a smoking shell after he'd tried to make  _kreyla_ for the first time and hadn't kept a close enough eye on it.

Nyota doesn't cook.

* * *

_**Rehkuh** _

Scotty doesn't know how to cook.

He doesn't have anything against the practice as a whole - after all, everyone gets tired of replicator food after a while - but who the hell has the time to learn so many recipes? He certainly doesn't. And to spend so much time on something that is then consumed so quickly seems like a waste to him.

Before he joins Starfleet, Scotty lives with his parents - sometimes they cook, most of the time he uses the replicator or has dinner courtesy of one of his more food-inclined friends. While he's in Starfleet, it's pretty much a replicator-only diet - when he has the time and/or money to eat. After all, he's usually a bit busy with his various Engineering projects, and most of the time he just... forgets. Scotty likes food, don't get him wrong, but he likes engineering more.

(Once he befriends Keenser, the Roylan reminds Scotty to eat at least once a day, bringing him sandwiches or soup in bottles, something he can eat and keep tinkering at the same time.)

Scotty doesn't know how to cook.

* * *

_**Kehkuh** _

Bones cannot bring himself to cook.

He used to cook all the time, Bones used to love cooking. He had a recipe book generations old, pen-on-paper, passed down through his family. It doesn't have a name, just the Book. He used to go through it with his father, the pages with torn corners their favourite recipes, the ones they'd always make together. The messiest recipes had a spot of mixture here and there on the page. Him and his father cooked together since Bones was five and had to stand on a stool to reach the counter, since he sat on the floor and sieved the flour and pretended it was snow falling onto a mountain.

Once whatever they were making was in the oven or on the stove, they'd scrape the bowls clean and eat the leftover mix (provided it wasn't poisonous raw). Good taste, bad taste, strong taste, weak taste, they'd eat it all, scraping it off with spoons and spatulas and fingers.

(Bones's dad dies two years into his Starfleet training. They mail him all his dad's old stuff and give him the rights to the house. He sells the house and auctions off all the stuff except the Book. It sits in a cardboard box and gathers dust.)

Bones cannot bring himself to cook.

* * *

_**Kaukuh** _

Gaila never liked cooking.

Back at home on Orion she had to cook for her whole family. Gaila reckons she might've actually liked it if she'd only had to cook three or four times a week and not three or four times a day.

Stopping at the shops on the way home from school, buying the cheapest food in the place and carrying it home, groaning under the weight. Sometimes, if the shops near school were closed, she'd walk for hours in the burning heat to get a few sacks of grain. Go home, cook, do as much school work as possible, hide her PADD in the usual place. Her mother's refusal to use advanced technology was driving the whole family into the ground - it just cost too  _much_. But still she refused to use a replicator.

(Gaila had saved all the money she could from her odd jobs for two years and bought one when she was twelve. Gaila's mother found it and smashed it to shreds while her daughter stood with tears streaming down her face.)

So Gaila bought the cheapest food she could find, imported grains from barely inhabited planets where acres of crops stretched as far as the eye could see. She cooked whatever she could with whatever she had, throwing together ingredients from left,right and centre. It always came back to bread. Rye bread, oat bread, wheat bread, rice bread, whatever was cheapest. Always Terran crops - they were the bottom of the market, come from the Terran farming colonies that refused to grow anything but their homeworld's grains. She'd mix grains and flours when they didn't have enough of each. If the bread didn't cook or rise properly they ate it anyway. Sometimes, if they had the water, she'd try other things - pasta, quite often, that basic Terran dish.

Sometimes with the bread they'd have freeze-dried and tinned vegetables that would last for years if you didn't open them and barely tasted of anything.

Gaila scraped through school with grades just enough to get her into an intermediate coding course. She moved out of her family home on her birthday and got a job at a small tech store. She took two loaves of bread with her and ate nothing else for a week, until she had the money to buy a replicator. She had no furniture, no running water and barely enough to cover rent and electricity, but she punched in a code and out came a bowl of soup, vegetable and noodle, another Terran dish.

Gaila ate it in three minutes and then sobbed for three hours.

Gaila never liked cooking.

* * *

_**One** _

Spock has cooked his entire life.

When he was two he helped Mother in the kitchen with making breakfast. She made him watch over the broth, and occasionally stir it. He kneeled on the stool next to the cooker and stirred it in circles, breathing in the scent of stewing vegetables.  _This_ , he decided,  _this is good_.

When he was four he found Mother's book. A recipe book - paper and ink, how antique - with  _handwritten_ recipes. Titles, ingredients, instructions, preparation times and cooking times. Recipes from Terra, recipes from Vulcan, recipes that could only be mixes of the two. He sat down and began reading. Stuffed oysters. Couscous peppers.  _Kreyla_. Vegetarian chili, using an assortment of Vulcan spices. Plomeek soup, made entirely of Terran vegetables that tasted similar to the originals. He reads the whole book.

The next day he sets the book down beside Mother while she's reading and demands that she teach him every single recipe, that they make him every single one. She smiles and says, "If that is what you want, I will teach you. Every day we will make a different recipe and when we get to the end of the book we will start again."

They make all 983 recipes, and Spock is five.

He writes his own. They try it, and Mother proclaims it "Unusual, but delicious." Vulcan has formed her such that Spock trusts her candor, and he smiles.

They go back to the start. This time, every recipe, Spock changes something that he thinks will make it better. If it does, he adds it. If it doesn't, he does not.

They get to the end, and Spock has added notes to 795 of the recipes, and he is six.

(At school, when he arrives with a little flour that he hadn't noticed on his sleeve, or with the scent of pepper and curry about him, they make fun of him, but he does not care. Cooking is pure and good. Cooking is Mother and they will not take that away from him.)

Spock writes more. He comes up with more ideas, mixing everything he's ever thought of. They stream into his mind. Some succeed, some fail miserably. He changes the failures until they succeed. He writes them into Mother's book in a black Terran fountain pen, in Standard. Perhaps it does not make perfect sense, but the ideas are conveyed effectively enough. He understands, and Mother understands, and that is all that matters.

Spock is seven and his bond with T'Pring does not take. They cannot explain it, but they say he is already bonded - he has a _t'hy'la_ , they say. But T'Pring learns of him before then, and she sees how he loves to cook, and she does not turn away. After the failed bonding, she comes with him to his home, and he shows her the book. She expresses interest, and he makes her Mother's recipe for plomeek soup using avocado and celery and cucumber and courgette and aubergine. She says that both nutritionally and palatably, it is superior to the original Vulcan, and she inquires if she may cook with him. He accepts, of course - T'Pring had been one of his few positive acquaintances - 'friends', Mother would say - before their failed bonding, and there is not reason why she should not remain so.

Spock is eight and he must choose three focuses at school to work on further. He chooses linguistics, chemistry and biology. He learns about the growth of plants and vegetables, of how they form from chemicals in the ground and energy in the light. He learns how the chemicals react and stretch and change when put together with heat and power. He learns how to convey this in Mother's tongue. And he continues to cook, with T'Pring by his side. She chooses linguistics, coding and computer technology. She helps him when he cannot find exactly the right word in Standard to express an instruction. She does not question  _why_ he writes in Standard. It is an absolute with him - he writes the recipes in Standard, or not at all. Maybe the first few drafts are in Vulcan but everything in the book is Standard.

Spock is nine and T'Pring comes over one day with ingredients that are neither Vulcan nor Terran. "They are from Rodia," she explains. "I believe it would be beneficial to use these in the place of the black pepper in the vegetarian lasagne recipe - I hypothesise that the flavour would be subtler."

They try it, and she's right.

Spock goes to the market and realises just how  _many_ planet's crops there are. He buys a few from each and substitutes them into recipes where he thinks they would be better. He carefully writes "or you can alternatively use" beside each of Mother's looping sets of ingredients, and he fills in his own.

Spock is ten and Mother and Father go away for a week on an Ambassadorial trip to Terra, and they leave him behind. When they come back, the kitchen is a total mess and the fridge is full of food that Spock and T'Pring have made and not (or only half) eaten. Spock levels a look at Sarek and silently dares him to say something. Sarek raises an eyebrow and says, "I presume you will return the kitchen to its previous state once you are quite finished." The two of them go bright green and begin to clean up, but the good news is Amanda doesn't have to cook anything for the next week because they can eat Spock and T'Pring's cooking (which is great because she's exhausted after the trip).

Spock and T'Pring do not stop cooking. By the time they're sixteen both of them can rattle off recipes by heart. The record for one recipe which uses most varied ingredients is their combination of an Orion dish,  _kelbekah_ , a Vulcan dish that's basically a soup and an obscure Terran dish somewhat similar to lasagna. It has fourty-six different ingredients and each one is from a different planet.

(It also takes them an entire day to make, but you know. Priorities.)

When the two of them move to Terra together and enlist in Starfleet Academy (in the end, it's T'Pring who breaks the VSA's perfect record - she applies just to show she's capable of getting in and then joins Starfleet anyway), they still cook every day. Now they have to use slightly cheaper ingredients, but they have all the time in the world (Starfleet courses are so easy it's kind of pitiable - Spock doubles up on the sciences and linguistics tracks and still he's the best by a considerable way in all his classes) so they make lots of things that need to stew or steam - pastas and soups and rich lasagna and casseroles.

Spock becomes an instructor of chemical and biological sciences, and of xenolinguistics (he teaches three classes, one on Vulcan, one on High Vulcan, and one on Standard for learners). T'Pring becomes an instructor in coding, and in computing technology, and they have less time but more money on their hands. They change their recipes again, and still they live together, and still they cook together.

Then a Human Cadet called James Kirk hacks Spock's test (he says it's his, but T'Pring actually coded most of it, as his own programming skills, while intermediate, were not outstanding) and then Vulcan is destroyed and Spock and T'Pring meditate together in silence after everything is over.

After five hours of meditation fail to calm their minds, they go to the Enterprise's one and only kitchen. It is thankfully deserted. They check the fridge, and find only a few vegetables. Spock draws up a list of everything they can make with it, and then T'Pring says what he's thinking, and he stops worrying and grieving and wondering. He cooks, and he just  _is_.

As they cook, they talk - it's a Human method of coping that proves surprisingly effective. T'Pring talks of the pain of her mind - she had so many more bonds than he, and now they are destroyed. He offers to ease her pain, and she refuses, saying she must carry it. "The pain is a part of me, Spock," she says. "I cannot escape it any more than I can escape my own skin." Spock's mind dwells less on the destruction of Vulcan and more on the slap on the back of the shoulder and the lightning bolt that came with.

"The Captain is my  _t'hy'la_ ," he says, a hint of panic in his voice. "I do not know how, but he is."

T'Pring cannot give any worded answer to that, but she does not need to. She hands him a knife instead and asks him to chop up some onion.

Later, when Jim kisses him for the first time in the Human way, he says Spock tastes of cinnamon and vanilla. Spock professes his fondness for cooking, and particularly for those two spices. He has been becoming more Human, the longer he spends with his  _t'hy'la_.

After Spock mentions that, Jim starts to try a lot of Spock and T'Pring's cooking - his favourite's their recipe for a vegetable pasta sauce made mostly of Orion vegetables. He likes eating the food well enough, though he can't stand to be in the kitchen. The Vulcans understand: they cook the food and bring it out and the three of them sit and eat together. It's one of Jim's favourite pastimes - he likes making it into a game, asking Spock not to tell him what they're making and try and figure it out from the smells.

(The first time he has a panic attack because he smells seared meat, Spock feels it through the bond and sprints out of the kitchen and spends twenty minutes calming him down. Spock had been trying to make meat for Jim, but he's never cooked it before and massively overestimated the cooking time. He never makes meat again - he sticks to his usual vegetarian recipes, and Jim couldn't be happier.)

During their first five-year mission, Spock and T'Pring cook and keep track of the time only by the Standard calendar. Therefore, Spock doesn't remember his birthdate by the Vulcan calendar. Or rather, he wouldn't have if Jim hadn't wished him a happy birthday on the bridge and asked him to come to Rec Room 5 with T'Pring after shift.

When they get there, the room's packed. Jim turns to Spock and T'Pring and hands the two of them a book. They open it - and Spock is struck speechless.

Inside is recipes.

Hundreds of recipes, two or three from every member of the crew, family recipes passed down for generations. Pen on paper in more languages than the two Vulcans can name, all with what Spock and T'Pring can tell is newer ink running down the sides translating them into Standard.

Bones says it's the first and last time he'll ever see Spock speechless, but in truth it's because Spock can't swallow around the lump in his throat.

So he and T'Pring do what he did with Mother when he was four - they make three new recipes every day.

When they finish, they go back to the beginning, and they start again.

Spock has cooked his entire life.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own 'em - if I did, it would be a lot more diverse.  
> The title is because of every single recipe for muffinscupcakesflapjackscookiesbiscuitsshortbread that says 'Bake for ten to fifteen minutes or until golden-brown'. Idk, it just seemed appropriate.  
> For anyone who doesn't know, 'wuhkuh', 'dahkuh', 'rehkuh', 'kehkuh' and 'kaukuh' are the Vulcan numbers one to five.


End file.
